How to Enable Night Light in Chrome OS

You may be aware that watching a display at night can be harmful to your eyes, which in turn, affects your health. This is because the blue light in the screen distorts your natural (circadian) rhythm and prevents you from falling asleep easily at night. Major operating systems like macOS and Windows have been natively offering night modes but sadly, Chrome OS did not feature any such option until recently. Google has recently pushed a new update to the Chrome OS Developer Channel, that brings a native “Night Light” feature. So if you’re a Chrome OS user who loves to operate his/her Chromebook at night, read on as we tell you how to enable Night Light on Chromebooks:

Enable Night Light in Chrome OS

Note: I tried the following method on my Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA, and it worked just as expected. Also, this requires changing your channel to the Developer build, which will powerwash your device, thus deleting all your data. It is hereby recommended to backup any important data on your device before proceeding.

The first step is to make sure that your device is on the Developer Channel. To do so, head over to Settings and click on the hamburger menu button to reveal the sidebar. Here, click on “About Chrome OS”.

In the About Chrome OS section, click on “Detailed build information”. It will now show you on which channel your Chromebook is currently on. Click on “Change Channel”.

Note:The above option is only available to the owner user account. If you’re using a different account, log out, and log back in using the owner account.

A list of various channels will now show up, including Stable, Beta, and Developer. Select “Developer – unstable” from the list, and click on “Change Channel”.

Now that you’ve done that, go back to the settings page. The system will now update your device to the developer channel. Once done, you’ll be prompted to restart the device. Click on “Restart” to proceed.

Note: The current channel will still be shown as Stable. That being said, once you restart your device, it will be changed to “Version x.x.x.x (Official Build) dev”.

Upon restarting your device, open up Google Chrome and enter the following Chrome flag in the address bar:

chrome://flags/#ash-enable-night-light

A screen with various Google flags should come up. Under the heading “Enable Night Light”, click on “Enable”. Once you’ve done that, you might be prompted to restart your Chromebook. Click on “Restart Now” to apply the changes.

Now that you’ve done that, head over to Settings -> Device -> Displays. Scroll down to the option of Night Light, and enable the toggle next to it.

Alternatively, you can also set a schedule for the Night Light from “Sunset to Sunrise” or define your own “Custom Schedule”. Furthermore, you also have the option to modify the color temperature, by altering the overall warmth of the color.

Read Comfortably at Night Using Night Light

The inclusion of Night Light is a great feature for Chrome OS users. It helps those late-night owl users to operate their Chromebooks more comfortably in the dark. While the feature has been around for a while now on multiple platforms, it is nice to see it being made available on Chrome OS as well. Do keep in mind that the feature is currently only on the Developer build, and it may take another few update cycles before the feature is finally pushed to the Stable build. Let us know your thoughts on the inclusion of Night Light, and whether you’ll be using this feature or not, in the comments section below.

2 COMMENTS

Any idea when this will be rolled out to the main Chrome OS?
Seems like this has been around for a while now on the Developer build.
This is something that will be a great addition to Chrome OS and I can imagine many people will be happy when this comes through.
Do you have any review / comment on Night Light? (It’s functionality, comparisons to other ‘night mode’ applications e.g. f.lux and those integrated into other operating systems.)
Thanks 🙂